The Girl and the Stars

Somewhere behind him came a rumbling, a grinding of metal and stone. Icicles began to fall in droves, tinkling as they broke against each other, crashing on the floor below. A shape larger than any gerant hulked into view behind Pome’s followers and they parted before it, more scared than exultant. The heartbeat that Yaz had thought to be from Pome’s new star grew louder still.

“Pome . . .” Arka stepped back, horrified. All around her the Broken retreated, weapons raised.

As the hunter stepped into clear view Yaz’s friends drew back, only Quell and Thurin standing their ground beside her. The thing stood taller than the one she had destroyed, its iron-scaled head scraping the ice ceiling, broader too, its limbs an irregular array of steel and iron, some ending in serrated blades, one with a sharp spike longer than her arm, yet another with an articulated hand that looked disturbingly human though far larger. Yaz understood now. She had been listening to the heartbeat of the star within the hunter, fierce and strong and deep. If she could rediscover the strength she had used in the city she might stun the monster but there would be no ripping this one apart, it was just too powerful. Her mind ached already just at the thought of reaching into it.

The hunter took another step, a clawed foot striking sparks from the stone.

“Stop!” Pome held up his arm and the hunter halted a yard from him, red starlight glowing from its joints.

Arka rallied herself, the scars on her face deathly pale. “You can’t trust in that thing! We’ve spent our lives running from them. How many of us have they killed? I don’t know how the regulator has bound that monstrosity to his will but even if it serves him now I still don’t trust it because I don’t trust that old man, not one jot. He personally threw all of us down here, for gods’ sake!”

“I don’t trust anyone, Arka.” Pome brought his new star closer to him on its iron rod and, to gasps from the opposite side of the fissure, he reached out, closing his other hand about it. His face twisted as if he were holding his palm above a lamp flame but with a snarl he pulled the shining red stone free of the clasps holding it. His fingers couldn’t quite meet his thumb around the surface and the crimson light turned his whole hand bloody. “I trust this!”

Pome made a violent gesture toward the hunter with the star and the massive metal body slammed back across the chamber as if struck by some invisible hammer that only a god could wield.

The thing clattered to a standstill yards back, having narrowly missed crushing several of Pome’s followers. The hunter picked itself up as the men and women who had thrown themselves aside got to their own feet.

“I trust this!” Pome held the star aloft, twitching with effort. “The hunter has a star like this at its heart and as I control this one I control it too.”

The hunter began to advance again. When it reached the fissure it would be over in one stride.

Yaz stepped to meet it, shaking off Quell and Thurin, who both reached to stop her.

“Bring her to me.” Pome clutched his star as if it burned him and gestured the hunter toward her.

Yaz extended her will across the ice-rimmed fissure. Her mind skimmed across the blaze inside the hunter’s iron casing and settled instead on the rapid pulsing of the star-stone in Pome’s fist. Something had been done to the star, some subtle alterations to its patterns. Pome had called the hunter the regulator’s gift, his miracle, and Yaz sensed the old priest’s hand in these changes. And behind the priest stood the Black Rock’s Hidden God. And behind the Hidden God? Just like the Pit of the Missing there was no telling how deep it all went.

Undoing the priest’s changes to the star was beyond Yaz’s ability, certainly at a distance and in a hurry, but she had an alternative. At the last moment Pome sensed what she intended but his opposition was clumsy, as weak as a toddler wrestling a full-grown man. She dimmed his star’s fire, reducing it to a molten glow.

Immediately the hunter slowed then stopped. It lost direction, casting about for its target. The crimson glare from its eye slits slid across the Broken on both sides of the cavern.

“Bring her!” Pome roared, extending the star toward the hunter as it teetered on the fissure’s edge.

But Yaz had hushed the voice of Pome’s star and instead the monster painted him with the fierce glow of its eyes as if considering him prey. And in that moment, with the light of Pome’s star no longer streaming between his fingers, Yaz noticed it. Two stains retreating to regain the shelter of the sleeve that had been pulled back when Pome reached his star toward the hunter. A black stain and a scarlet one, both moving like oil on water. Evidence that the star he now struggled to hold had already broken free parts of his mind.

“Pome’s tainted!” Yaz shouted, pointing. “Look! Devils under his skin!”

As she shouted her accusation the hunter seized Pome in its oversized metal hand and at the same time jabbed its killing-spike at his closest guard, Bexen. The gerant, with his unsettling stare, one eye savage, the other milky, looked small for once. The spike’s tip punctured the great shield he was holding and tore it from his grasp, sending him sliding perilously close to the fissure.

On all sides the Broken began to run. Nerves, already stretched to breaking point, now snapped. The instinct to run from hunters was strong, and they ran. Yaz ran too, straight for Quell. “This is it. We need to leave now. We get Zeen and then get out of here.”

They sprinted from the cavern with the last of the stragglers, the floor behind them thick with broken icicles. Turning the corner into the next smaller cavern Yaz found Thurin waiting for them. Quina had stayed with him, Kao hulking at the back. Petrick hung uncertainly at the opposite exit.

“Where’s Maya?” Yaz looked around, half expecting to find the girl stepping from a cloak of shadows.

The rest shook their heads.

“She’s good at hiding, that one. She’ll be with Arka or the others.” Thurin looked worried despite his easy words.

Quell shrugged. “If we’re going to get Zeen then let’s do it.”

“And after that?” Quina asked. “All those things you said, Yaz? Do you think we really can escape?” Screams came from the Icicle Cavern.

“I think we should try.” Yaz didn’t want to lie to them. “I think the dangers won’t be worse than what we have to deal with down here. Just different.”

“Is it true though?” Quina asked. “About the green place? Somewhere we can live?”

“I just want to go back,” Kao rumbled from behind Thurin, his voice a man’s, his tone a child’s. A great crash made them all glance toward the tunnel they’d fled down.

“I can’t go back. I’ve never been.” Thurin pressed his lips into a worried line. “All my life is here. My ancestors. Leaving it would . . .”